That's why I name my bots "A" and just ban any username with "a" in it. If you can't get it 100% right, fuck it, do whatever you want.

:(

There are certainly far more Clydes than there are Discords (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?)

I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.

..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.

So I perhaps should have been more clear.

If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece.

The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord.

In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.

> (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?)

In this post-Brony society, I’m sure of it.

(Discord was the name of the villain on the show… I think. Never seen more than half an episode myself.)

> has anyone even been legally named Discord before?

There was a Roman goddess named Discordia (where "discord" came from), and in the 90s Hercules and Xena TV series the Greek goddess used that Roman name instead of Eris, but simplified to just Discord.

Those two series were pretty popular, so I can see it being more likely recently than in that 1950s census sibling comment found. On the flipside, that character is probably not something parents would want for their daughter.

There's not exactly a list of canonical human names per se, but "bots can't use human names" would still be a very sensible rule for us to have. Put the cost and the burden on companies making bots, not on individual people who got unlucky.

Also names are part of human culture, and Alexa for example has been in use for a very long time. There are valid reasons for names to die off in a single generation (eg adolf) but this is not a reason that our culture gains anything from imo.

We can put bounds on it.

Here's an easy lower bound, for the context of avoiding collisions: The name has to have been used by at least two different humans.

Or to get closer to a reasonable bound, 100 humans.

How would you know how much it has been used ?

We don't even have a database for all the humans alive today, much less one for the last 400 000 years...

You can be pretty confident without a comprehensive database. If you're unsure about a name then don't pick that one.

And people that are dead won't be inconvenienced, so you can ignore them.

People (and lawyers) might get annoyed if you called your bot Avici, even though he is dead and won’t personally be inconvenienced by it.

Naming something after a celebrity is a different issue entirely. It's actually a bigger problem if the celebrity has a non-regular name!